Protocol pipelining

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Schema of non-pipelined vs. pipelined connection.

Protocol pipelining is a technique in which multiple requests are written out to a single socket without waiting for the corresponding responses. Pipelining can be used in various application layer network protocols, like HTTP/1.1, SMTP, FTP.

The pipelining of requests results in a dramatic improvement in protocol performance, especially over high latency connections (such as satellite Internet connections).